One for the Road
By Deborah Zafer
I think Gabrielle was the last person on earth to wear clothes.
They say that when children saw her, they averted their eyes, embarrassed.
When I met her though, she was beautiful. We both were. It was the hottest day London had ever experienced and even with all the windows thrown open and the fan trying its best to move the air around, it was sweltering. I barely tolerated my vest but Chris, the manager, insisted.
“Let me tell you a secret my man Daniel,” Gabrielle said, clocking my name badge as I poured her pint, “there will come a time when you will have to decide what you stand for and you must not falter.” She banged the bar for emphasis.
“Uh huh,” I said. I’d not met her before but I was used to crazy talk and keen to earn tips, “tell me more.”
“It’s like this,” she said, taking a stool, “you see the way things are going? It’s the coming of the dark times is what it is. I’m telling you. And we will all need to pick sides one way or the other.”
“I see,” I said, putting the glass down on a beermat in front of her and wiping around it where there were crumbs left by the person who had sat there before. “So, what will these dark times look like then, do you think?”
Droplets ran down the outside of the glass as she picked it up.
Offer to buy me one, I thought to myself, imagining how it would feel going down my throat, all cold and delicious.
“That’s the thing,” she said, seemingly oblivious to my thirst, “it won’t look like anything at first. It will just be a series of small choices one after the other that we all make until one day–BOOM–we wake up and we’re on the other side of the abyss. Unless we’re careful, that is.”
“OK,” I said, unstacking glasses from the hot washer ready for the evening rush. “I get you, but if what you say is true, maybe it has already started. Maybe this is it now? Maybe you sitting here and me serving you and us talking like this is already part of the dark times. Have you thought about that?”
“I have indeed,” she said, reaching into her bag and pulling out a pack of cigarettes which she slid towards me.
“Nah,” I said, “not for me, thanks.”
“Back in a minute,” she said, sliding off the stool and going outside to smoke in the shade.
As she walked away, I noticed how small she was and how delicate. If I hadn’t been working, I might have gone outside too, for the companionship, but as it was, I went back to stacking glasses. My thoughts drifted away from the end times towards more pleasant things like what takeaway I might order that night or what I might watch as I fell asleep.
“Do you want to know the answer then?” she said, seeming to appear from nowhere. I turned to see her on the bar stool again.
“To what?”
“To how I know these aren’t the dark times yet. You know, like you asked?”
‘Sure,” I said, “enlighten me.”
“Well,” she said, arms on the bar, “think about Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden and how it was only after they ate the apple that they knew being naked was weird, right?”
“Uh huh,” I said, “I remember the story.”
“Right, well. The dark times will be here when we no longer know why we should be ashamed or even that we should be,” she said, throwing the glass back to catch the last drops. “It will be when we no longer even talk about climate change or war or any of that. Any knowledge we have evaporates. Poof. Buried in a haze of social media and press-of-a-button food. You’ll see. It will happen.”
“You mean like a reverse Garden of Eden?” I said, leaning back against the fridge, wondering if she was a mind-reader as well as crazy.
“Exactly,” she said, “like we’ve put the apples back on the tree and said no thank you mate, no knowledge for me today. Just make me innocent again.”
“It doesn’t sound so bad though,” I said, “it sounds OK.”
“Maybe,” she said, putting a fiver on the bar and climbing down off the stool. “But it’s not living, is it? Not really. Think about that while you have a drink on me.”
“I will,” I said, waving and starting to pull the pint as she went out into the heat, “thank you.”
I didn’t think about her again after that, to be honest. The years went by in a haze until she appeared on my TikTok feed one evening around nine years later.
Everyone had stopped wearing clothes by then. It was just too hot. We weren’t ashamed and I guess I thought it was beautiful the way our naked forms moved around the city unabashed. I could barely remember what it felt like to have anything between me and the sun or why I had ever thought it necessary.
Seeing her there gave me a shock though. She was standing on top of a hill wearing something I recognized as having once been a cloak and there were others around her cradling remnants like they were holy relics. She was slighter than ever but unmistakably the same person. More beautiful even, maybe.
I wanted to tell her to stop, to take care, but she had disabled comments a long time ago. She had too many followers I guess, all waiting to watch her fall.
Instead, I raised my empty glass to her, wherever she was, whatever she thought she was doing as she leapt up, up, up towards the sun leaving her cloak lying on the ground like a pair of discarded wings.
Deborah Zafer (she/her) lives in London. She mostly writes short fiction and is working (very slowly) on her first collection. Her writing has been published in 3am Magazine, Scrawl Place, Lilith, Jewish Fiction, and Janus Literary. She can be found on twitter @deborahzafer and at www.deborahzafer.com.